ABOUT

I make paper-based collages. Some take the form of handmade one-off three-inch badges. Others are the size of a book or magazine. Both emerge, in different ways, from my ongoing participatory creative project, Badge Cafe.

Overall, my artistic practice explores intensities and ironies of queer longing and belonging. I’m interested in strange bedfellows, full holes and what you can get for a nine bob note – or (if you prefer), generative incongruities, revealing absences and questions of where value lies, on whose word, with what consequences.

For two decades, I was a critic, programmer, producer, filmmaker and campaigner engaged with moving image, cabaret, queer and DIY cultures. In 2019, I completed a PhD on the queer utopian capacities of participatory creative practices, and their transformative potential for individuals, groups and society. My ideas about such “homemade mutant hope machines” were developed in collaboration with legendary queer performance collective Duckie. In 2022, Duckie asked me to dust off their old badge machine at their weekly club and I found a new calling.

Badge Cafe (as the resulting format became known) helps people relax, create and connect by making badges out of old books and magazines. These crafty utopian hangouts combine standard badgemaking kit with carefully curated materials and a “hope machine” sensibility. Soon they spread from Duckie to various queer, nightlife, community, arts, culture, heritage, education, health, care and other settings. Now it’s my day job.

My own badges are created through this process, using materials and techniques sourced and honed for Badge Cafe, sometimes augmented by bespoke materials such as metal leaf and my personal archival stash.

The larger collages emerge differently from Badge Cafe. When participants cut circles out of books and magazines to make badges, the resulting holes reveal the pages below. This creates thousands of new visual and thematic juxtapositions. I preserve, as found, a fraction that I find particularly striking. 

You can read an interview about the collages here.

I live and work in London, where I was born.